Computer animation, the art of creating moving images via the use of computers, is a common form of audio-visual presentation, where the provided content ranges from television programming, television advertisements, feature movies, short films, cartoons, music videos, computer games and video games. Further these different forms of computer animation, traditionally presented to the user via a television or within the movie theatre are now presented with, and supported by, a multitude of electronic devices including personal computers (PCs), laptop computers, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), video game consoles (consoles), handheld game consoles (handhelds), cellular telephones (cellphones), and portable multimedia players.
Economically, such computer animation in the form of physical and online sales represents a global business today of approximately $40 billion in 2006 and expected to grow to over $65 billion by 2010. The dominant segments of this market being computer animated feature films, computer games, console games and handheld games.
In addition to this significant global economic element of “entertainment oriented animation” there is an immense amount of animation generated by individuals and businesses for a wide variety of uses ranging from advertisements, education, etc. Whilst difficult to provide economics, an estimate of the quantity of such material may be estimated from quick searches using Yahoo and Google, within their specific video databases for animations. Such searches return 153,000 and 98,000 animated videos as of Jun. 5, 2007.
In computer animation, commercially available systems are essentially digital successors to the art of stop motion animation of 3D models and frame-by-frame animation of 2D illustrations. Some examples of current animation software include Amorphium®, Art of Illusion®, Poser®, Ray Dream Studio®, Bryce®, Maya®, Blender®, TrueSpace®, Lightwave®, 3D Studio Max®, SoftImage XSI®, Alice®, and Adobe Flash® (2D).
For 3D animations of characters, the characters are modeled on the computer monitor and 3D figures are rigged with a virtual skeleton. For 2D figure animations, separate illustrations and separate transparent layers are used, with or without a virtual skeleton. Then the limbs, eyes, mouth, clothes, etc. of the figure are moved by the animator on key frames. The differences in appearance between key frames are automatically calculated by the computer in a process known as tweening or morphing. Finally, the animation is rendered, the rendering providing the features of the skin, clothing, etc.
It would be apparent that within the thousands of different computer game titles and tens of thousands of different animated videos that a significant amount of work is expended in generating the virtual skeletons, providing the character models, and rendering the physical forms of the characters. Presently, this is typically done by specialised artists. This has a corresponding cost to a studio or animator in producing the audio-visual content with computer animation. These costs increase essentially linearly with the number of characters, as they are all generated individually, and with the degree of resolution that is applied in generating the models. For example, characters within background may be modelled and rendered at low resolution, whilst characters in foreground modelled and rendered at high resolution, particularly the main characters. The lower complexity of generating a wide variety of characters such as fantasy characters and cartoon-like humans influences decisions studios, animators and others make in generating their computer animation. Even so the costs of generating computer animated characters are significant and clearly evident when one considers that even animated films with fantasy characters and cartoon-like humans such as “Shark Tale”, “Toy Story 2”, “Incredibles” and “Finding Nemo” have production costs ranging from US$80 million to over US$100 million per motion picture.
Throughout the remainder of this document the term “avatar” is employed to refer to a computer animated character. Originating from video games, “avatars” are essentially a player's physical computer animated representation in the game world. Typically, a video game offers the player a single avatar or a predetermined limited set of avatars from which to select as the basis of their “player” within the game. As such these avatars have been generated typically in accordance with the process presented supra in respect of skeletons, wire-frames, and rendering. Online games such as “Second Life” provide only 12 avatars for the user to select from, whilst video games such as “Alien Arena 2007” (COR Entertainment) offers 11 avatars for the player to base their player upon.
Recently, to reduce the complexity for animators in generating avatars for their audio-visual content, some commercial software suites offer the animator such a library of stock avatars to select from. One such leading commercial software suite being “iClone 2.0” from RealIllusion, which offers 15 base avatars for the animator to select from. Unfortunately, this is very limited.
It would therefore be beneficial to provide a way for an animator to rapidly generate an avatar and manipulate their characteristics. Further, rather than requiring the animator to always envision, provide a skeleton, wire frame and render their avatar completely it would be beneficial to provide a solution offering the animator the ability to start or select a relatively small number of input selections, and provide simple intuitive interfaces allowing them to focus their creative skills on the manipulation and refinement of the avatar, whilst offering them a wide range of potential outcomes.